


Wild Hunt

by lynndyre



Category: Tales of Vesperia
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Best Friends, M/M, Reunions, newgameplus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-11
Updated: 2013-07-11
Packaged: 2017-12-19 03:15:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/878772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lynndyre/pseuds/lynndyre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Flynn's return to the capital was quiet, without the bright finery of many of the other pilgrimage cities, with a different anticipation, a quiet humming of <i>home, home, home</i> that burned away the fatigue of his muscles and made every scent sharper.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wild Hunt

Flynn's return to the capital was quiet, without the bright finery of many of the other pilgrimage cities, with a different anticipation, a quiet humming of home, home, home that burned away the fatigue of his muscles and made every scent sharper. Even before the final forest, the horses had known the path back to their familiar stables, and walked quicker, lifted their feet higher. Flynn felt the same way, and the faces of his fellow knights told him he was not alone. Great blossoming monument trees and distant ports and spires of metal among sand were all burned into his memory, but the smell of the trees here was unlike the smell of any other forest, and the river still sounded as rushed and unhurried and constant as it had the day it tossed him half a mile down its course when he was seven summers old. The world was huge, everything he'd imagined to attain seeking to join the knights, and more beyond. But returning to ground he knew was a sanctuary he'd not realised until he left it.

The castle grounds were busy and welcoming, the stables warm. Flynn answered the hails addressed to him, but stabled Kita himself, taking the time brushing her down to ground himself again, to find a center in the midst of the city's noise and overwhelming familiarity. When the call came to head to inn and tavern, Flynn followed, let himself be caught up in the reunions and the songs and the mead, as twilight darkened into dusk, into dark. The stew and bread were the same he'd grown up on, and somewhere up in the floors above was the attic he'd slept in. It neared last call when he caught his eyes watching the door again, and turned them back to his mug and his fellow knights. The figure he watched for never entered.

The last round came with an offer from the mistress of the inn, to sleep upstairs if he didn’t care to return to the castle, but Flynn knew whose things still haunted the spare room at the end of the corridor. He smiled and shook his head and let her pat him on the shoulder while Adecor and Boccus laughed. When the group began to scatter outside, though, he found he didn’t want to return to the castle and his body wasn’t ready for sleep. Instead he walked, inn to marketplace to smithy to canal, letting his boots feel the familiar stones again.

The night air was changeable, on the edge of seasons and shifting between balmy and cool with the strength of the wind. Flynn let his feet follow the watercourse down through the darker areas of the city, but met only a sleeping dog and an alley cat, perched on a barrel and tearing at the remains of a rat with its teeth. It was the cat who alerted him that something had changed, dropping its meal and vanishing into the shadows in an ignominious clatter of refuse. At first Flynn thought he’d spooked the animal, but then the very air became charged, as before a lightning storm, and Flynn could hear the beat of unshod hooves echoing on the stones. He sped his steps towards the sound, turned another corner and emerged at the low bridge where the watercourse passed beneath the royal quarter above. The area was deserted, lit only in patches by the work of the public lamplighter, but the hoofbeats still echoed.

Then a man burst free of the shadows between buildings, running and stumbling full tilt for the bridge. A second later things followed, not quite wolves with bright markings, and hedgehog-boars, and small scurrying things that bounced and spun beneath the feet of the others. The fleeing man reached the bridge and collapsed, sprawling along its length, and Flynn ran forward, expecting to see him crushed- but the creatures broke upon the canal’s edge... like water, spinning away and straining at the bank, but never crossing onto the bridge itself.

A horn sounded, Flynn spun and found himself facing the source of the hoofbeats, a man- something like a man- riding something that even the tallest of tales could not have called a horse. His mount reared at Flynn's approach, beating the great wings that spread from its head. The rider was revealed as the animal quieted, emerging from the sweeps of blue feathers. His head was horned, with small, branching antlers like a young buck’s, four-pointed, but the glossy black hair that caught the lamplight and shone purple was more familiar than Flynn’s own reflection. The horned man whistled and threw out an arm, and the bird that alighted there had the beak of a hunting horn, its call the deep belling note of the same, ringing against the stone and calling an end to the hunt.

The animals melted away. At Flynn’s feet, something bounced, wiggled, thwapped its tail around his calf and vanished. And Yuri swung down off his mount and stood in front of Flynn, on the empty cobblestones.

“Yuri.” Flynn’s chest hurt.

“Damn it, Flynn. He got away.” Yuri stepped onto the bridge, but the space where the man had fallen was empty. Flynn let out his breath, then chastised himself that his relief was more for Yuri crossing running water than a man’s life.

“You’re still real.”

“What?” Yuri faced the far side of the bridge, staring up to the taller houses. “I’ll have to ferret him out of there by hand, now. When did you get back?”

“Today. After noon. I couldn’t sleep.” Yuri’s hair was jagged in back, as though he’d cut it himself by grabbing pieces and reaching around. He turned, and Flynn’s eyes drank in his face, the planes of his body beneath his open shirt. “When did you- get back?”

“There are places I can come through in the woods. Bringing anybody else needs it to be midnight, though.”

Flynn nodded, his calf still tingling from the touch of the vanished creature. “Not under a hill then.”

“No. I could find you a ring of mushrooms, if you’re desperate.”

Flynn followed Yuri onto the bridge, close enough to touch if he reached out. He forced his hand still. “You were the one who called the wild hunt on Magistrate Ragou, weren’t you, Yuri? We received word of it passing through the guild city.”

Yuri faced the water, giving Flynn his back again. His hair hadn’t been so long, before. And his boots were strange, nothing Flynn had ever seen in a cobbler’s. But he still stood just the same, and Flynn’s eyes traced the cant of his hip up the line of his back. “You know he’d already escaped Imperial justice. Sometimes people need another kind. Otherwise he’d have gone right back to killing.”

Training gave Flynn’s tongue an answer when his mind did not. “You’ve no jurisdiction within a human city.”

“If people need it, I do. You weren’t here, Flynn. Two years, and most of the better knights were with you. These guys-” he swept out a hand encompassing all the buildings on the poorer side of the bridge, but didn’t finish the thought.

Flynn looked down, then nodded. The mistress of the inn had been setting a bowl of milk by the hearth as the knights left. “I understand. But I don’t agree with your methods.”

Yuri raised a dismissive hand, and waved it back and forth. “So now you can do something about them. I would have thought you’d jump at the chance to get this city back the way you like it. Course, I figured you’d be a little happier to see me, but I was planning a better entrance.”

Then he turned, and there wasn’t anything dashing or strange or new, it was just Yuri leaning back against the railing as if he had all the time in the world. He looked at Flynn through his bangs, which needed trimming. “The great Flynn Scifo captures dastardly inhuman villain, all in a night’s work, huh?”

Flynn swallowed. “I’m off-duty. And we both know all I’d get from arresting you is a dungeon full of ridiculous bouncing rats.” Yuri laughed, and something in the pit of Flynn’s stomach twisted free and unfurled like a climbing vine.

 

The night was lightening into false dawn when Yuri slipped out over Flynn’s windowsill, dropping to the lower balcony and giving a careless wave as he disappeared beyond the courtyard. Flynn’s pillow had a hole in it, and his bed and probably his hair were full of stray feathers. But the restless energy of the night before was gone. Home- all his homes- had received him back.


End file.
